Body exhumed as authorities try to identify cold case victim | TuscaloosaNews.com

More than 32 years have passed since a group of strangers gathered in the corner of a small church cemetery to bury a woman none of them knew.

Thirteen people attended the funeral for the murder victim on what a Tuscaloosa News story described as a sunny December morning in 1980. Grave diggers dropped their shovels and acted as pallbearers. The county sheriff and two funeral home employees sat in the seats normally reserved for family.“Known in life, but unknown in death,” the Rev. W.D. Billups said during the prayer, according to the story. He prayed for the family “who didn’t know a member had died.”Officials now hope that they can find that family and let them know what happened to the woman, who was found stabbed to death and dumped on a dirt logging road in Vance.

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Arrests made in old Richland homicide case –

An anonymous tip led to two arrests in a pair of 6-year-old Richland County cold cases.Deputies have charged Christopher Trice and Tomasina Miller, both 23, with murder, armed robbery and kidnapping after the department’s cold case investigations unit received a CrimeStoppers tip that implicated them in the shooting death of Joseph Richardson at his Garners Ferry Road apartment Nov. 12, 2006, and an armed robbery at the Dollar General at 4045 W. Beltline Blvd. on Aug. 26, 2006. Trice and Miller were both teens when the crimes were committed.Lott said the anonymous call broke both cases years after the trail had gone cold.

“That anonymous call through CrimeStoppers has allowed that family to stand up here with me today and take that next step toward recovery that they need so much,” Lott said at a press conference Thursday.

Deputies responding to a shooting call at an apartment building in the 7000 block of Garners Ferry Road found the door to Richardson’s apartment forced open and the man laying unresponsive on the ground with a gunshot wound to his upper body. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The case was investigated, but few leads turned up, Lott said. What leads deputies had dried up quickly, and the case went cold. It wasn’t until the tip came in that deputies determined that Richardson was killed when robbers targeted his home by mistake.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/06/08/2306610/arrests-made-in-cold-case-homicide.html#storylink=omni_popular#storylink=cpy

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